Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘You’re reading Jane Austen,’ he said, delighted.

  ‘I got it from the library,’ Dottie said after a moment, disliking the tone of surprise in his voice. Why shouldn’t she read what she liked? At first she was inclined not to reply. When he sat down and spoke, she had found herself tensing, preparing for withdrawal.

  ‘Do you like her?’ he asked, half-turning on the seat to face her.

  ‘Yes, I like reading historical books . . . romances and things like that. I only found out about her last week, but I’ve read two of her novels since then,’ she said quickly, and then stopped suddenly, thinking she was talking too fast. He nodded for her to continue, an expectant smile on his face. She shook her head slightly and looked away.

  ‘Jane Austen a writer of romances!’ he said, a hint of suppressed laughter in his voice.

  She assumed he was mocking her. ‘Yes,’ she said defiantly, leaning back a little to get a good look at him. She saw that his lower lip trembled, and that a flicker of misery appeared behind the brightness of his eyes. It was a shock to see at once into a man’s face like that, and she looked away again, surprised by his vulnerability.

  ‘I’m sorry. I meant . . . I should’ve thought of that myself,’ he said, explaining himself. ‘I like her too, but I was always put off by the seriousness with which the teachers spoke about her. That’s what I meant when I said that . . . I should’ve learned to think of her like you say, then perhaps I would’ve enjoyed her more. Although I do get fed up with all that dreary drawing-room conversation sometimes. I haven’t read her for a long time . . . perhaps I should.’

  ‘She is so funny,’ Dottie said, smiling, losing some of her own fear as she heard him stumbling and feeling for the right things to say. This time she forced herself to speak calmly. ‘And she does it so cleverly. Those pompous women! They would be frightening in real life, but she makes them seem ridiculous,’ she said, thinking in her own mind of the matron of the school where they had kept Sophie. It was with a glow of self-satisfaction that she remembered how she had dealt with that fierce woman. ‘The men are all so English,’ she said.

  ‘So what?’ he asked, laughing and pretending to look offended at the same time.

  Dottie smiled too. ‘So dignified . . . but you feel she is laughing at them too. I’ve been thinking, while I’ve been reading this,’ she said, holding up a copy of Mansfield Park, ‘She would’ve been a nice person to know. Don’t you think?

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said looking dubious, but his smile none the less broadened as he talked. ‘You’ve almost convinced me, but I suspect she might turn out to be too much for me if I actually met her. There was something I remember disliking about her. I think it was that I had no feeling that she thought there was anything amiss in her taboo-ridden world. Perhaps I’d better start reading her again as soon as possible before I say something really foolish. Do you think she gives the men the same treatment as the women? You know, pompous old jokers? I seem to remember them being undeservedly rich and constantly moralising.’

  She liked the way he said that. ‘The men she writes about are all so ignorant!’ she said, making him laugh.

  Dottie found herself thinking about Ken that evening. He had spoken in such an easy, pleasant way that she regretted his going when he changed buses at Clapham Common. The look of pain had surprised her, made her feel for him. There had been such little time, but she liked the comfortable way he had of leaning forward to talk, as if he was unaware of himself. She guessed that he was more knowledgeable than he made himself seem, and she was slightly ashamed for having shown off, but that had pleased her too. If he had challenged her, she would have taken everything back, but he did not. Perhaps that was what people did, she thought. They talked as if they knew what they were saying.

  The next morning she looked out for him but he was not on the bus. She made a face at herself. As the bus travelled the short journey to Stockwell, she began to shake herself out of the fantasy she had allowed herself to fall into during the lonely hours in her room. He had only spoken to her out of vanity, unable to resist the flirtation which he assumed she had signalled with all those intercepted looks. Above all else, he was an Englishman, and probably thought of her as a dusky bit of stuff that he could use and discard. She had seen the look in his eyes, and it was no different from the cruel light she had seen in men’s eyes ever since she was a child. The thought made her smile, for it made her think of Ken’s face and the laughter she had seen in it. She was trying too hard, she told herself, because she didn’t really mean it. She was just pretending to be fighting him off.

  When it was time for a coffee-break, she saw him hanging around near her line, sweeping behind the machines and keeping an eye on her. He gave her a small, surreptitious wave, and she grinned. The women in her line noticed and nudged and winked at each other. ‘Look what I bought on the way to work,’ Ken said, after they had got their coffee and were standing outside to escape the crush of people in the absurdly tiny pre-fab that served as the coffee bar. Out of the deep back pocket of the factory overall, he pulled out a copy of Emma. ‘I started to read it on the bus,’ he said with a laugh.

  She noticed that the skin on his face was weathered. Perhaps he had had a strong tan which had faded. The creases in his cheeks were sharply etched, as if newly-made on an otherwise unblemished surface. A sign of some recent troubles, she thought, that time had not yet kneaded and pounded into the contours of the face. In his laughter she felt the anxiety she had sensed before, but it did not seem now like a sudden glimpse of something raw. It was more an attitude, a kind of uncertainty. Perhaps he was simply miserable underneath the smiles, she guessed, and was doing his best to hide his unhappiness.

  ‘Have you been working here long?’ he asked.

  She nodded, disappointed that he had not taken her for one of the students. He had only been working there for about three weeks, he told her. They offered him a permanent job but he had preferred a weekly contract. ‘I don’t know whether I want to stay in London. Maybe I’m just passing through. I don’t really like the big, dirty city. I was born in Dorset, you see, and I was brought up on a farm. Anyway, I don’t know why they offered me a permanent job. There must have been about half a dozen of us turned up that morning.’ He glanced at Dottie, then smiled when he saw the accusation on her face. ‘I suppose the personnel woman did not want to offer Pakis and wogs a permanent job unless she had to.’

  The women teased her when she got back, asking for his name so they could make their own approaches to him. Whenever he walked past they called out to him, and he walked past often as the day approached six o’clock. On the bus he told her that his other name was Dawes. ‘I’ve just come back from Australia,’ he said. ‘I went to work on a farm there too. I love farms. That’s my ambition, you know, to live on a farm; and paint and write poems and go fishing. Not that I’m doing anything to make that ambition come true.’

  ‘Didn’t you think Australia would make it come true?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe, but it didn’t work out. I think I’ve just got into the habit. I travel around a lot, bumming around. And when things don’t work out I travel some more.’

  She saw that he looked shame-faced as he said this, that it was something he disliked himself for. He took a sudden deep breath, as if he would change the subject.

  ‘What was Australia like?’ she asked, intending to help him. ‘I’ve always liked the sound of it. Starting again, making a fortune . . .’

  ‘I’m not sure you’d like it,’ he said, looking uncomfortable. ‘Not that I really know anything about the place. I said that I went there to work on a farm but I never made it out of Sydney. All my time in Australia I washed up dishes and waited at tables in an Italian restaurant. I don’t think it’s an easy place to start again and make a fortune. Not any more, anyway, and certainly not for a woman.’

  ‘They wouldn’t even let me in,’ Dottie said. ‘White Australia and all that. I was just sayi
ng I liked the idea of starting again, wiping everything off and writing a completely new story. I expect if I was given the chance I’d find myself doing the same thing again, working in an Australian factory rather than an English one.’

  He smiled. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I suspect you’d turn the place inside out.’ She saw that he did not get off at Clapham Common, and glanced at him for an explanation.

  ‘Can’t I catch a Streatham bus from your stop?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  There was a look in his eyes, as if he was expecting her to say more, perhaps extend an invitation. She looked away towards the darkening Common, and saw the usual crowds outside the pub by the pond. The late evening light had lost its lustre, and the trees and lawns it illuminated looked flat and leaden-coloured. Children were running on the grass, chasing each other and tumbling over their frantically excited dogs. A handful of fishermen were still sitting patiently by the edge of the pond, as absurd and still as garden gnomes.

  ‘The United States was much more interesting,’ Ken said after a moment. ‘I came back from Australia through there. From West to East . . . and a bit of North and South as well. I even got as far as Canada. It was my first time in America. There’s so much happening there. You can feel the place moving, and nothing seems impossible. This new man, I hope he wins, John Kennedy. Can you imagine anyone more different from old Eisenhower? I saw a Civil Rights march in Tennessee. Those people are brave, you know. The marchers and the freedom-riders, I mean. You should’ve seen the Gospel-spouting barbarians who were opposing them with their whips and dogs. If I could’ve I would have stayed in America.’

  ‘How could you afford all that wandering?’ she asked. ‘It must cost a lot to travel like that.’

  ‘I saved some money in Australia, and worked my passage to California,’ he said, smiling easily. ‘Then I worked across the Atlantic as well. It’s not that hard when you know how to bum around.’

  ‘Where else have you been?’ she asked.

  ‘India, Argentina, Indonesia. For one year I worked on a tanker. The Suez Canal and the Middle East.’

  ‘You’ve done so much! I haven’t been anywhere,’ she said, her voice soft with self-pity. ‘And you can’t be much older than me.’

  He got off the bus at her stop as well, but he stood still beside the road, making no effort to accompany her further. ‘I’m not as young as you think,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Shall I wait here for the Streatham bus?’

  They travelled home together every evening of that week, and on Friday they stopped off for a drink at the pub on the Common. It was too crowded to stay inside, so they took their drinks outside and strolled slowly in the evening gloom. Dottie did not say anything very much, relishing Ken’s effortless conversation. She did not tell him that it was her first time in a pub, and that pubs were places she had always taken long detours to avoid walking past, let alone going into. It was something to do with Sharon, she supposed, and the people who used to come round to see her. She had always associated drinking with their harshness and unpredictability. No wonder Hudson and Sophie had found her unbearable to live with. No wonder they had left as soon as they could!

  She was glad Sophie and Hudson were not there, though. In her mind she had all but agreed to the suggestion that she was certain Ken was going to make. She hoped he would not say anything yet, would not make it seem that he was in a hurry, but she would agree whenever he did. She thought that what was happening to her must be falling in love. Whenever he was not with her, she thought about him. At night she imagined him with her, and lay awake rehearsing every stroke of her hand on his body. As they walked, she deliberately nudged into him now and then, to feel his warmth along her arm while she listened to him talk about the things he had done.

  ‘You said you grew up on a farm,’ she said after a long and friendly silence. ‘Were your parents farm workers?’

  ‘No, no, they own the place,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you go back there then, and fish and paint and all those other things you said?’ Dottie asked, amazed that anyone should choose a rootless life when they had some land to which they belonged.

  Ken smiled at her and shrugged. ‘Maybe I will,’ he said.

  Later, he kissed her before he left her at the bottom of Segovia Street to go and catch his bus. ‘I feel like a teenager,’ he said, before turning to hurry away.

  The following night they went to the cinema. On the way home she took Ken’s arm, sliding her hand into the crook of his elbow, and she felt him turn to glance at her. She invited him in, hoping that her inexperience in such matters would not show. She had debated if she should say anything and was still irresolute when they reached her room. The house was silent but she could hear music and laughter through the open window. When she turned to Ken after drawing the curtains and putting her things on the chest of drawers, all thought of what she should do or say left her. She went to him eagerly, and he held her in his arms for a moment before he kissed her. In the terror and wonder of being with a man, there was also some feeling of dread. The pain mingled sweetly enough, though, with all the other unexpectedly gentle pains that her body suffered, and she was swept along by the happiness of her first love.

  First Love

  1

  It was a lovely September, with a mellow warmth that is impossible to imagine later in the year. To Dottie it seemed that there was a hush in the air, as if all the urgent and irresistible forces of creation were at rest, gathering strength for the next long haul. The skies were clear and bright, and gentle breezes blew from the south, making tree-tops rustle and whisper in the lavender light. The crash of metal on fatigued bones, the silent howls of doomed crowds, the growls and lurches of runaway machines and other elegies of urban life, made way for gentle, benign sounds uncommon to Dottie’s ear. Nine bean-rows of growing things and hives for the honey-bees.

  She knew that it was not really like this, and that the gently swaying trees, leaning towards each other in the warm breeze, were pushing armour-tipped roots deeper into the earth in a frenzied search for food, and that behind the most banal or tranquil exteriors seethed hives of corruption and violence and waste. Yet even though she knew all this, she still liked to think that everything was becalmed before a transformation. She laughed, thinking that all the romantic novels she had been reading had gone to her head, but she could not resist the picture of herself as someone between lives, about to discard a useless, dried-up self for a healthier, hardier one. All else around her seemed to be silent with similar resolve, waiting to move itself into the next journey. It was not even spring, a traditional time for such delusions, but the height of the growing season when ahead lay only the frantic weeks of accumulation against the biting cruelties of winter. On reflection, she liked this idea better. Like a giant tree, or a thrifty rose, she was already planning a regenerated self in the spring.

  It was tempting to think that her life, or whatever it was inside her that was noble and capable of sure deeds of imagination, was no longer indifferent to the fate she was to suffer. Of course it could not be like that, but she felt that the world itself was aware of her at last and was pausing in its business to take another look. My, Dottie has found a little happiness! For the first time she was not running in fear from what was around her, and had learnt how unnerved she had been. Now she knew the meaning of her life, she thought, when before she had known nothing but a cringing expectation of pain and suffering, a victim’s genuflection. She had shut her eyes, drawn a deep breath and plunged in. When she came up again she was laughing, joyful for the sheer majesty of her deliverance. That was the meaning of her life, she thought, to make sense of all the enchantments that the world was full of. Not just because she had known a man, but because he had lifted the fear and oppression she had lived with all her time. She would once have tossed that kind of declaration off as worth nothing more than a lot of hot air. But she had been allowed a glimpse of the mysteries of th
e world, no less, and had a sense of having found a place for herself in them. That sense had swept away the numbness that had dulled the quickness in her, and she now felt alive and full of zest. No longer would she be gainsaid by the clutter that had penned her in for so many years.

  She thought all this secretly, with embarrassment, because there was enough scepticism in her nature to make her hold back, to make her stand off with a sneering expression, while another side of her threw itself into the flood. Her birthday fell within the first week of being with Ken, and she had had to wait until she was twenty-one, she thought, before she could gain such simple knowledge.

  They spent all their time together. After work they caught the bus and went back to Balham. It was obvious from the start that he was not bothered about rushing back to his room, and he was happy to spend all his nights with her. Dottie had to overcome an anxiety that came easily to her, and stop herself from asking him to go home at night, at least. Could they not do this casually? Gently? Did they have to behave quite as recklessly as they did? The part of her that urged caution was routed and despatched, and she surrendered herself to new pleasures with a kind of relief. She had heard the voice that advised her to take care, but that voice wanted to ask about how long she and Ken would last. Whether he had someone else and was only using her, violating her. She did not know the answers to these questions. If her feelings were not much more than the gushing immaturity of an emotional adolescent, she knew there was something finer in entertaining them than in allowing herself to turn sour and deformed with loneliness. Perhaps she was overawed by the pleasures her first love released, or perhaps she would have done better to make herself difficult and force Ken to value her more. But she knew that she had never lived through a time like it, and that was enough to begin with.